Focus less on specific individual

Studying a specific person can be dangerous because we tend to study extreme examples, the billionaires, the CEOs or the massive failures that dominate the news and examples are often the least applicable to other situations, given their complexity. The more extreme the outcome, the less likely you can apply its lesson to your own life, because the more likely the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck or risk.

You will get closer to actionable takeaways by looking for broad patterns of success and failure. The more common the pattern, the more applicable it might be to your life. Trying to emulate best rich man’s success is hard, because his results are so extreme that the role of luck in his lifetime performance is very likely high and luck is not something you can reliably emulate. People who have control over their time tend to be happier in life is a broad and common enough observation that you can do something with it.

A lot of people in the world, how they lived, how they changed, what they did for work, what they are for dinner, there are more relevant lesson to take away from this kind of board observation than there are in studying the extreme characters that end to dominate the news.